African Carrion Ecosystems and Their Insect Communities in Relation to Forensic Entomology

摘要

African carrion communities contain representatives of the same families that occur in carrion communities on other continents. Checklists and identification guides are tabulated, and the natural histories of core members of the terrestrial communityare outlined. Because of strong phylogenetic trends in the biology of the families, the species are effectively ecological surrogates of their relatives elsewhere. These phylogenetic trends also allow the definition of a set of guilds of functionally equivalent species that unify the study of carrion communities world-wide, and a revised suite of guilds is described with both synecological and forensic purposes in mind. Although the decomposition process has been arbitrarily subdivided into stages, theyhave little direct relation to the dynamics of the carrion community, and should be treated as landmarks rather than phases. Community turnover follows a qualitatively predictable succession, with the greatest species richness and diversity around the ecotone-like transition from 'wet-phase' to 'dry-phase' carrion habitats. These habitats are differentiated along interacting ecological gradients of dietary quality, competition, and risk of predation, which are important to the core guilds. Competitionand predation have strong effects on population dynamics of community members, but link particular species only weakly, so that the succession pattern largely reflects the autecology of the individual species. Discrete waves of species are absent, whichincreases the temporal resolution, and therefore the forensic value, of the succession as a 'clock'. The forensic significance of various aspects of community and trophic dynamics are discussed, and means of applying ecological theory to investigations are reviewed.